


Anger Leads to Hate, Hate Leads to Suffering

by PerfectPurgatory



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond, Gen, based on the novelization, mood swing from one extreme to the other, part of a fic challenge, pov exploration of Kylo Ren, uses quotes from the book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 04:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14012013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerfectPurgatory/pseuds/PerfectPurgatory
Summary: Kylo Ren's past has come to haunt him, and his anger is palpable. The Resistance has gotten away, and the new Supreme Leader is desperately seeking to hunt them down. However, his focus on his and his family's failures quickly turns to his recent abandonment by the one person he thought he could trust. He prepares himself to face her, but quickly realizes his mistaken emotions once he finally does.





	Anger Leads to Hate, Hate Leads to Suffering

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a weekly fic challenge by the two-halves-of-reylo tumblr (two-halves-of-reylo.tumblr.com). It takes elements (and exact wording) from the recent TLJ novelization by Jason Fry, but the majority of this fic was written directly by me. The scene I elaborated on - the last Force bond scene where Rey cuts Kylo off - was painfully short and simple in the novel, and I felt that I needed to add more substance to it. I hope this does the scene and characters justice!

Kylo stormed through the rent in the massive stone door, stormtroopers hurrying behind him with their rifles ready, hunting for enemies.

 

But there was no one to meet them – just empty transports and a jumble of discarded equipment.

 

He wasn’t surprised. The moment his uncle faded into the breeze, he had turned around and screamed. He knew at that point that it was a distraction. His uncle wasn’t there to fight him or impart some wisdom before he died – and Kylo had felt him die. No, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker knew what he was doing. He had looked exactly as he had looked on the night he had betrayed Ben Solo, allowing Kylo Ren to rise.

 

Kylo had finally stood up to his uncle in some capacity, though it wasn’t nearly as cathartic as he sometimes dreamed it would be. It left him just as empty as before. Nothing was accomplished between the two, and Kylo felt like a fool for wasting that time. He could have flown his flag ship past Skywalker instead of letting his emotions get the better of him. He could have stormed past him and entered the cavernous mine without having a confrontation, allowing his troops to deal with him.

 

But he knew he would always be ruled by his emotions to some extent. His rage and fear would always be with him. No amount of fighting or destroying could take that intensity away. And that was his problem; at first, it had been an asset. Snoke had seen the conflict in him and the anger and had helped him redirect it into his training. It had proved itself time and time again within the first few years. It made him ruthless, and it made him nearly unstoppable. Still, he wasn’t good enough for the Supreme Leader. He worked and he worked and as the years went by and he gained nothing but more pain and confusion, those once-streamlined negative emotions turned into a near-debilitating disadvantage. It kept him up at night. It distracted him. It made him weak because the emotions were tied to the pillars of his past that had refused to support him. And now that they were dead, he was even worse off. He had to forget about them, somehow.

 

Luke Skywalker didn’t matter. What mattered was the Resistance, and he let them get away. He had allowed them to have hope, something that was very dangerous in the hands of rebels. He knew Hux was somewhere scowling in Kylo’s general direction. Hux only held contempt for his new Supreme Leader. That weasel of a general would no doubt plot and plan the extraction of Kylo from the throne.

 

_Throne._ As the word stuck in his head, Kylo looked around for someone who wasn’t there. He was standing in the middle of the cavern, surveying the area with anything but stoicism. There was one person he should be thinking about, and it wasn’t his traitorous family. It was Rey. It was her fault. She was the one who did this. She probably called on Skywalker to come. She knew what he had done to Ben, to _him_ , but she allowed him to come anyway. His heart twinged. He didn’t care about the scavenger. He would hunt her down and destroy her. No doubt she would find her way back to the remnants of the Resistance, and once he finds one of them, he would find the other.

 

She wasn’t just a scavenger though, he had to remind himself. He remembered back to the interrogation chamber on Starkiller, back when he was naive about her powers. He had looked into her mind and had found vast deserts and skeletons of old war ships. He had seen her bartering for food and water, a little girl crying in her cot in a metal prison because her insides hurt, and she was waiting for some relief that would never come. She _was_ just a scavenger to him then. He had been surprised; he had expected more. And when he got more, when he had a taste of her powers, he had been even more surprised to find that it mirrored his own. She fed off him, and the Force surrounding him was just as willing to mingle with hers. Her signature in the Force was strong, giving out wave after wave of pure energy, occasionally interrupted by a deep vein of confusion and fear and anger, all emotions which Kylo knew too well. The Force around her ebbed and flowed smoothly, where he knew his to be more chaotic and volatile. If he was the crashing waves on the side of a cliff threatening erosion, she was the calm lapping of the water against the pebbles on the shore of a bay. 

 

After that moment, after he realized what she was capable of and what he could do to help foster that energy, he had desperately tried to get Snoke to let him train her. He had tried to buy them more time before Snoke’s patience ran out. At the arrival of Han Solo, all of that changed. The girl was forgotten. Kylo killed his father and was wounded in the process.

 

As Han Solo’s body fell through to the planet’s core, and Kylo Ren knelt holding a bowcaster wound in his side, he heard a scream coming from above. Rey was there. And she wasn’t just screaming for the loss of her newfound father figure; she was weeping for Kylo as well, much to his own surprise and terror. Somehow, he knew she could feel his pain. He didn’t know how.

 

She had left him alive after the fight on Starkiller immediately following Han Solo’s death, and she had left him alive again earlier in the throne room. He didn’t know why she left him physically untouched, and that infuriated him. He had felt a connection with her, deeper than any other person he had ever met, and she had thrown it away for the small band of filthy rebels that were, until recently, under his mother’s charge.

 

The moment Kylo set eyes on her when she came aboard the _Supremacy_ , he knew everything would change. She was sincere in her pleas to him. She had come all this way seemingly for only him. The look in her eyes, the want and the hurt and the understanding, was too much, too good to be true. And he was right in that assumption.

 

She threw him away, just like Han and his mother. She had betrayed him, just like Luke. She was no better than them. He told his uncle that he would destroy her and everything else and he had meant it. The rage boiling just under his skin was just barely kept at bay, and he itched to destroy something. He wished she was in front of him, so he could cut her down. Everyone else from his past was dead. The only person who had a chance to be in his future didn’t want him, so there was no point in trying to keep her around. She was now a part of his past, and his past must die.

 

Kylo, his face a mask of fury, swept into the control center. It was empty, too – deserted. He stalked around it, teeth bared, and the stormtroopers quickly found a reason they needed to be elsewhere.

 

Something on the floor caught Kylo’s eye. He knelt, his gloved fingers closing on a pair of golden dice linked by a short chain.

 

The world around him felt unstable, if only for a moment. He remembered playing with this exact pair of dice. Like Luke, it was a ghost of his past. His emotions oscillated between resentment and nostalgia.

 

As Kylo stared at them, he sensed something else – a tremor in the Force, the prelude to a familiar connection.

 

Before he raised his head to acknowledge her, he briefly rehearsed the venom he would spit in her direction. He pictured himself standing up and yelling at her, threatening her, letting her know who and what he was once and for all: a monster. Kylo Ren.

 

He looked up and immediately felt small. The speech he planned to give got caught and died in his throat, and he realized at that moment that he had made a mistake. He couldn’t be angry at this woman who gave him so much strength. He couldn’t bring himself to talk, to ask for her forgiveness or a second chance, to just _talk_ to her again, and she made no move to break the silence. Kylo was still kneeling, he realized. He didn’t feel confident enough to stand and truly face her. She had asked something impossible of him, but he had just as quickly asked something impossible of her, and he realized that now.

 

Searching her features for anything that would give away what she was thinking or feeling, he felt like he was trapped in his head. Everything he wanted to say died before he could open his mouth. His lips were quivering, and he felt weak. He was tired. He wanted all of this to be over, all the torment and pain. He thought he could get rid of it by getting rid of his past, but that didn’t help. Now, he had wanted to erase any chance of a future with her in it, and, looking at her now, he couldn’t understand how he could have ever felt like that.

 

He found himself wanting to explain. He wanted her to understand. He would let her into his mind unfettered if she would look at him like she did in the elevator again, like he mattered. He cared what she thought of him, and that fact alone was terrifying. Yet, he saw more hope within her than he ever saw in himself and in Snoke. It was an odd feeling.

 

Surely, she would understand. If he could just get her to listen to him, maybe if he were able to reach out and touch her now, she would stay.

 

Kylo stared at Rey. She stared back at him, her gaze level and unafraid. There was no hatred in her eyes, as there once had been. But there was no compassion, either.

 

_Why didn’t you kill me?_ He so desperately wanted to ask her. At least if she had, he would be free, the whole galaxy would be free – from the plague that is Kylo Ren. He almost wishes she had killed him; it would have made things less complicated. He was done searching for signs in her body language of the Rey he saw in the elevator. He knew she may never forgive him, and he would have to learn to live with that, however painful it may be. At this moment, he only wanted her to _understand_. He craved that feeling of mutual trust he had known the moment she came to him about the mirror.

 

A moment later, Rey severed the connection, leaving Kylo alone in the gloom with his father’s dice resting in the palm of his upraised hand. A moment later, they faded and vanished.

 

Every remnant of his past was now gone. He killed his own father. He was unable to stop the torpedo that launched his mother into space. His uncle had just given his life for the cause he believed in. The dice were now just as material as everything else. He had even killed Snoke, his master, who he had given everything to when his family didn’t want him. He had killed everything linking himself to Ben Solo, but he found himself feeling no less like Ben than he had before.

 

With downcast eyes, Kylo realized that Rey was now one of those phantoms, as well. He didn’t know how long she would – or could – shut him out. He still didn’t understand how the connection occurred. He would have to publicly be against her, he would have to play the part of Supreme Leader well, but he now knew he couldn’t tell himself that he would destroy her without lying.

 

As he realized the gravity of the situation he was in, he nearly slumped down all the way to the dirty floor of the control room. He had nowhere to go. If he stayed with the First Order and took over as Supreme Leader, Hux would make every attempt on his life he could. Ben Solo was never one for politics. He loathed the idea of being Supreme Leader if he thought about all the connotations of the title.

 

What he yearned for, what he wanted to build with Rey, was a just system free from ancient dogma and not weighed down by petty war. He would do everything he could to create a peaceful and united galaxy, and he would learn from the Empire’s mistakes.

 

Peace would never happen with the First Order. But he had no choice. He would carry out his regular duties as necessary, still going out to add a vast number of star systems to the ones already under First Order rule. But he would have to come to terms with his own complicated problems, and that meant talking to Rey.

 

As he slowly stood, making sure his legs wouldn’t give out beneath him, he assumed his normal stance, trying to look like he hadn’t just gone through the emotional equivalent of getting hit with a bowcaster. He walked towards the exit but turned to stare first at the ground where he found the dice, and then to the now metal wall that had been Rey. Satisfied that neither would return, he walked out of the room and back towards the hole he had blown into the large doors of the complex. He handed the command to General Hux and walked off towards his shuttle.

 

His emotions were raw, and they made his head ring. He wasn’t necessarily angry anymore, but he wasn’t content. He refused to lose the last piece of his immediate past that meant anything to him. He would find the Resistance just to get to her. He squared his shoulders and walked up the ramp to his shuttle to sit on one of the benches.

 

He breathed his given name into the air. He closed his eyes and found that his name didn’t bring down a bolt of lightning. He didn’t feel sick saying it, like he had previously. His head was still foggy from all the events his brain was trying to process, but he reached out in the Force to find that beacon of light, hoping that she somehow hadn’t managed to find a way to block him out that way too.

 

He found her easily, her waves just as steady as they had been before. He couldn’t tell where in the galaxy she was, but he could still feel her, and that’s all that mattered. He broadened his horizon and felt around for the faint signatures of the rest of the Resistance. They were all pin pricks compared to the enormity of Rey’s presence.

 

Kylo stopped breathing. Among those small beacons of light, there was one that burned brighter than the others. As he homed in on it, he immediately opened his eyes and felt more like himself than he had in years.

 

“Mom.” She was alive, and so was he, both probably thanks to Rey. There was still time. She had said it wasn’t too late, and he hadn’t believed her. He still didn’t know if he quite believed her now, but the feeling that was welling up within him was one of determination.

 

Kylo was calmer than he had been in years. The Force around him was steadier, less chaotic. Once again, he knew what he had to do, and now he knew that he had the strength to do it.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this, drop me a comment or a kudos! I'm still a new writer, and would love to have some feedback.
> 
> Thank you, two-halves-of-reylo, for inspiring me to write this!


End file.
